The Restaurant Chain With Nothing But Food Waste On The Menu

Bart Roetert felt a familiar sense of frustration as he walked past the leftover food piling up at the end of his grocery store shift ― overripe mangoes, day-old bread and one blemished tomato on a vine of five other perfectly good ones.

It was a cold November afternoon in 2013, and Roetert was working as a store manager for Albert Heijn, one of the Netherlands’ largest grocery chains. Just that day, he’d been talking to his colleagues Freke van Nimwegen and Selma Seddik about a business competition their company was running to find innovative ideas. All three wanted to see less edible food ending up in the garbage, and Roetert realized they could use the competition to achieve just that.

The trio pitched Instock, a pop-up restaurant in central Amsterdam that would serve meals made entirely out of surplus food from the supermarket chain they worked for. And they won.

Before long, with some financial assistance from Albert Heijn to get started, the team members were taking turns driving around the city three days a week in an electric car to collect unsold food from a handful of stores.

Instock

Fast forward four and a half years, and Roetert, van Nimwegen and Seddik run Instock full time. The social enterprise collects surplus food from 160 Albert Heijn stores across the Netherlands, has three of its own successful, permanent restaurants in Amsterdam, the Hague and Utrecht, and an online shop that sells surplus food to other catering companies and chefs. It also runs a school food waste program that offers resources and lesson plans to help teach children where food comes from, why food waste is bad and how it can be prevented.

“At the time we founded Instock, there was lots of talk about this issue, but we actually wanted to do something about it,” Roetert explained.

Instock is tapping into a growing global concern over food waste. One-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted.

But there’s no point having an environmental conscience if people don’t visit your restaurant. From the start, the important thing for Instock was creating somewhere people would want to eat, Roetert said. Its three restaurants are centrally located and have arty interiors where even the lampshades are recycled. Sitting down to lunch, you might be served a fluffy vegetable frittata alongside creamy tomato gazpacho and French toast made from past-their-prime croissants.

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